From Touchstone magazine's blog. Christianity Today magazine is increasingly skidding down the slippery politically liberal slope, and this commentary points out yet another way.

MY BIG FAT “SINGLE-ISSUE” VOTE
by James Kushiner

If you so happen to be one of those “single issue” voters on pro-life issues, like me, and perhaps a few million other thoughtful and concerned Christians in this country, then Christianity Today has a word for you: unwise.

In the interest of wising up, read their November lead editorial (“For Whom Would Jesus Vote? Single-issue politics is neither necessary or wise”). You will learn that CT agrees with the wisdom of a document from the National Association of Evangelicals called “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” CT says that it

encourages evangelicals of all political stripes to work together not just for the sanctity of human life, but also for religious freedom, family life, the poor, peacemaking, and creation care. While sanctity-of-life issue will always be of vital interest to Christians, today's context demands that believers engage a broad spectrum of issues.

(It's not clear whether the last sentence is CT or the NAE speaking. It doesn't matter.) We have already argued in “First Things First” that such a list of issues gives no biblical guidance as to the priority of some issues over others. Thus it does not help voters make truly biblical decisions, and worse, misleads them into treating secondary and prudential questions as if they were as important as the primary and certain.

The Bible is crystal clear that the sanctity of human life and marriage are the pillars of human society. Destroy them and you ruin everything on that “broad spectrum of issues.” It is not crystal clear on other matters, like what the government should do about poverty.

Well, where doesCT stand on the matter of abortion and related pro-life issues? We read in various paragraphs of the editorial that:

1) they are “of vital interest to Christians.”
2) “abortion is the wrongful taking of innocent human life and a grave sin.”
3) “the sanctity of human life is a given.”
4) “abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and like issues should be prime concerns for us all.”
5) “Abortion is a monstrous tragedy for the nation.”

But number 4 is followed by: “But we can't stop there. Jesus is Lord of all.” And then comes another appeal, from the NAE, that “while individual persons and organizations may rightly concentrate on one or two issues, faithful evangelical civic engagement must champion a biblically balanced agenda.” Number 5 is followed by another But: “but our Christian commitment to a culture of life does not permit us the luxury of abandoning other important issues.”

The editorial ends: “While single-mindedness in following Christ is always wise, single-issue voting may not be.”

So how should abortion affect our vote? Every Christian will agree with CT that “faithful evangelical civic engagement must champion a biblically balanced agenda.” But what is that balance? How is it expressed in the voting booth? Why is a balance in which life issues have the most weight unwise? Why is opposition to “a grave sin” and “a monstrous tragedy” to be treated as if it were of the same importance as differences over (apparently) welfare payments or the minimum wage? This the editorial does not explain.

The editorial makes much of its case negatively. It has you in mind, single-issue voters, when it says, “Many Christians think they at least know for whom the Lord would not vote, based on one issue.”

After mentioning senatorial candidate Alan Keyes's remark about Jesus not voting for opponent Barack Obama because of his anti-life vote in the Illinois Senate, CT notes

James I. Lamb, executive director of the pro-life group Lutherans for Life, also thinks he knows. “A candidate who favors abortion should be disqualified from receiving a Christian's vote.”

If this sounds like what a number of Roman Catholic bishops have said, it's because they have. But CT seems to muddy the Catholic waters as well. In invoking Cardinal Ratzinger's much-publicized and misunderstood clarification about “proportionality,” CT, ignoring the ample commentary by Catholic bishops, effectively resorts to misrepresentation by asking a question designed to frame the issue as they prefer to see it: “But how do you measure whether a candidate's goodon other issues outweighs his or her bad on the question of human life?”

The reader is supposed to think that Cardinal Ratzinger agrees that single-issue voting is unwise. But for Ratzinger the sort of “proportionality” which might allow someone to vote for a “pro-choice” candidate comes into play only when the alternative is doing something demonstrably worse than allowing or creating an abortion holocaust.

As some Catholics have rightly pointed out, it's hard to imagine a scenario today in which the Christian would be morally free to not vote for a pro-life candidate or to vote for a pro-choice candidate when a pro-life candidate is running. It certainly wouldn't be okay just because the Christian thinks the pro-choice candidate has better tax, education, welfare, medical, and/or environmental programs.

Read the editorial for yourself. See if you gain some moral clarity about your responsibility as a Christian in the voting booth. It seems entirely designed from beginning to end to assert the folly of those who vote “single-issue” (in this case, for George W. Bush), without a word of warning for those who might go too far in the other direction and who do not give life issues the weight even CT gives them, if only rhetorically. While telling readers what it thinks “unwise,” it does not tell them what wisdom is. (I will be surprised if the editorial was approved by executive editors J. I. Packer, Timothy George, and Thomas Oden.)

The editorial effectively muddies the waters for those whose consciences cannot endure the thought of supporting the slaughter of innocents, and salves the consciences of those who wish to vote for a candidate who is “pro-choice.”
The subtext of this editorial (and most other pieces decrying single-issues voters that I have read) seems to be “single-issue” equals “simple-minded.”

Single-issue, simple-minded, voter? No, not me. Just for the record, I've changed my mind. I am going to vote based on my concerns on a number of top-priority issues, not just abortion. Such as:

Human embryonic experimentation and research.

Human cloning.

Euthanasia.

Assisted suicide.

Defense of marriage as a man-woman institution. With the acceptance of gay-marriage as a constitutional right, public schools eventually will have to accept this redefinition of marriage and teach it. The traditional view will be termed “religious doctrine” and ruled as unsuitable for public schools, and perhaps considered as “hate speech.”

The appointment of federal court and Supreme Court justices who respect the sanctity of life and marriage.

The appointment of federal court and Supreme Court justices who respect freedom of religion in the public square.

Rolling back the activist judicial state that is demonstrably increasingly anti-religious.
After 1973, “single-issue voting” meant “voting against abortion.” But even then the wisest saw that they were not voting on a single issue, but against a legal, moral, and social evil that would express itself in more and more ways as people grew used to it. The other evils above have come in under the dark wings of that beast.

The list grows, and this evil affects matters like poverty policy as well. Over time, it will cheapen our society's view of all human life. If an unborn child has no right to live till birth, will people begin to ask why he has a right to food, housing, and education once he's born? Is a society indifferent to the claims of the vulnerable unborn likely to be one that cares much about the vulnerable born?

If Christianity Today can't see Brave New World lurking, and the need for Christians to vote against it as a “single issue,” it has lost its vision of “faithful evangelical civic engagement.”

A Test of Character
by Adam Yoshida

This election is a fundamental test of character for the nation, for the world, and for individuals. More than that: it is a test with just one question and one correct answer. Those who care for human freedom, those who care for the future of the West, and those who care for the survival of the United States of America are supporting George Walker Bush for re-election to the office of President of the United States. Those who don’t aren’t.

Next Tuesday is the date of the most critical battle in the War on Terrorism since September 11th itself. If Kerry wins this election, the terrorists will probably ultimately win. That may be harsh. That may be questioning the “patriotism” of those opposed to the Commander-in-Chief, but it also has the unique advantages of being true.

If Bush doesn’t win: we’ll lose and millions will eventually die. We may even ultimately lose our civilization. That’s how high the stakes are in this election. The future is on the ballot on Tuesday.

There’s no excuse for not being a Bush supporter this year. Those who oppose him fall into four general groups:

The Stupid: If the debates around the mechanics of voting this year prove anything they should prove that, upon the whole, Democrats are dumber than Republicans. After all, why else would the Democrats fight like hell to ensure that voters who don’t show up in the right place on Election Day can still vote? Why would Democrats be so certain that “undervotes” and “overvotes” would largely go to them? The answers should be obvious to everyone, seeing as they’re apparently obvious to the people running the Democrat Party: Democrats are likely to be disproportionately represented among those too stupid to show up at the correct polling place or fill out their ballots correctly.

These people tend to vote for Democrats because they believe themselves to be (and generally are) incapable of tying their shoes or bathing without a government program to tell them how to do so. Fortunately for us, these people are mostly to lazy to actually bother to vote. Most of the time when they do vote it’s because some Democrat with a big wad of walking-around money has roused them from the viewing of the Jerry Springer Show long enough to give them a $5 bill, a cigarette, and a ride to the polls.

The Ignorant: This is probably the largest category of Democrats. Among this group would be people whose sole source of news is one of the big networks and those who went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and came out without realizing that the film contains more lies than words. These are the people who believe any nonsense that’s thrown at them, even when that nonsense contradicts the other nonsense that they’ve been told. They tend to believe that an ability to recite from memory nonsensical conspiracy theories proves that they’ve got an IQ which can be measured at higher than room temperature.

For example they’ll explain to you, with a straight face, that the Iraq war is a result of sinister intrigue involving a “Neocon” (Jew) Cabal, the Saudi Royal Family, and Texas Oilmen. Because, as we all know, those are groups with strong common ties and affection.

The Foolish: There are some people who know better who are voting Democratic this year for petty or silly reasons. Most notable among this category is blogger Andrew Sullivan who, despite what he’ll tell you, is obviously voting for Kerry for the sole reason that he hopes that Kerry will allow the perversion of marriage. Andrew, it seems, doesn’t really quite get what our enemies do to his kind when they get the chance. Of course, I suppose, Andrew is well aware that as a result of his… past indiscretions… he probably won’t live long enough for that to matter to him personally in any case.

Traitors: This last group, also known as “Democratic activists” consists of all of the supporters of Kerry who don’t have their own idiocy, ignorance, or moral blindness as an excuse to explain away their otherwise inexcusable lapse in judgement. Like Kerry, most of these people would have been traitors in the Vietnam-era as well, opposing US victory then as they do now.

It’s just not safe to vote for Democrats anymore. There used to be patriotic Democrats: good men like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Harry Truman: but they’re mostly all dead or Republicans these days. The rest, out of a desire to remain loyal to the old party, have mostly drifted into category two or three.

Anyone who has been paying attention should have a fairly good idea as to exactly how a President Kerry would run the War on Terrorism. He’ll work to get US forces out of Iraq as quickly as possible and, beyond that, he’ll confine the war to limited operations of the sort that we saw in the Clinton era. He’s going to attempt to hide behind homeland security appropriations: he’ll dump tens (or even hundreds) of billions of dollars into these efforts to give himself political cover and then he’ll withdraw from active engagement with the enemy.

I think that Kerry’s view of terrorism is what he said a few weeks ago: if it is mostly ignored, it will be mostly a “nuisance” which means, in essence, that he’s willing to accept fifty or a hundred dead Americans every year as simply the “price of doing business” overseas. Some have said that it would be preferable to risk the loss of a US city to terrorism than to involve the United States in years of global war. Deep down, I think, Kerry probably agrees with that as well.

However, there’s an essential problem with this view: the War on Terrorism is a global conflict in which time is not on our side. We have a limited window in which to win this war easily because the demographics are running against us. In another twenty years we of the West are going to have to deal with an increasingly Islamic Europe and even a Canada where Moslems may constitute more than 10% of the population, making them the nation’s most powerful minority.

Today in France roughly 30% of those under twenty-five are Moslems. Think about that for a second. The Islamic birthrate is much higher than that among the native French, so that number is bound to continue to grow. In a few decades, France might be a Moslem-majority country. Think about that for a second. Even in the best case scenario in thirty years a third of Frenchmen will be Moslems.

From the opening steps of the Cold War to the end of the Soviet Union roughly forty-five years passed. The demographics and economics of the Cold War were on our side: we could wait the thing out and let Russian Communism decay from within. The same is not true here: if we wait, we’ll lose. If present trends are allowed to continue without being abated, what will our world look like in forty-five years?

Imagine for a moment if you will, what the world of 2049 might look like if we were to now abandon out efforts to slay the Islamist beast. The only Western nations which might still look like the West by then would be Australia and the United States. And even those nations will, in all probability, have been grotesquely transformed. Australia will, given time, take on an increasingly Asian character. The United States, without action taken to stem the tide of illegals, will be an increasingly balkanized nation. Islam will be on the ascent all across the world, with stern mullahs ruling from Tehran to Paris. In the east, the rising economic (and perhaps by then military) superpowers of China and India will contend for dominance in Asia. Even in the Americas, a rising Brazil will challenge the local economic supremacy of the United States.

In simple terms: if we don’t win soon, we’re going to lose this thing. It may be even worse than that. The rise of Islamism will not occur without resistance in large parts of the world. What happens when the Moslem majority in France tries (as it inevitably will) to impose Islamic law upon that country? What will courageous Frenchmen (yes, a few still exist) do then? By that point their options will have been essentially reduced to surrender, flight, or genocide.

Demography is destiny. If the present situation is allowed to go on, the Moslems will win. This is simply a fixed fact. If we fail to resist, if we fail to follow through on the revolutionary changes which the President is seeking to make, then we will be faced with a choice between defeat and rolling the dice on a decidedly unpleasant all-out apocalyptic war.

There’s only one way to defuse the demographic time bomb which threatens us: we have to transform the Moslem world. We dive into the heart of the Middle East and transform the societies there and several things will happen. First, as living standards go up, birth rates will decline. Second, as liberty increases, Middle Easterners will suddenly find themselves arguing about environmental regulation instead of better ways to blow up infidels. Third, as the Moslem world transforms, it will stop exporting its people to the West and may even take back some of what they’ve already sent. Either way, as the flow stops, those already in the West will probably assimilate.

This is a difficult plan, but it’s also the best one we’ve got and we all have to get onboard. If we fail in transforming that region of the world, the options we’re going to need to save our civilization in fifty years won’t revolve around liberty: they’ll revolve around atom bombs.

We must resist the temptations of evil and remain dedicated to the cause. George Bush’s cause this year is the cause of all decent men and women who may be found anywhere in the world. All who are moral, all who know, will join with me in supporting this President and seeing his mission through to its completion.

From The Spectator UK:

If Bush goes, I go
by Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

What’s up with Hawaii? Two polls in two Honolulu newspapers over the weekend showed George W. Bush with a small lead over John Kerry. That’s not supposed to be happening. Hawaii’s solidly Democrat. It’s a swing state only in the sense noted by Elvis (‘And when she starts to sway/I gotta say/She really moves the grass around’). Neither candidate has bothered looking in on the joint, or even advertising there. Instead, Senator Kerry’s been frantically bouncing around the Great Lakes — Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. It’s gonna kill him if he’s got to zip halfway across the Pacific every other day to shore up his base with a hastily arranged coconut-shooting expedition on the beach at Waikiki.

One poll would have been easy to dismiss. But two make a trend. And so, for Bush, as the old song says, ‘Hello, Hawaii, How Are Ya?’ Whereas for Kerry, as the even older song says — 1878, written by Queen Liliuokalani — it’s ‘Aloha Oe, or Farewell To Thee’. Since joining the Union, Hawaii has voted for the Democrat presidential nominee by some of the largest margins in the land every election day except two: in 1972 they went for Nixon and in 1984 for Reagan. So one could argue, as some psephologists are doing, that this is in line with Hawaii’s tendency to vote for Republicans when they’re incumbents (George Bush Sr being the exception to that rule).

But I wonder if something else isn’t going on here. Hawaii is, constitutionally, an American state but, geographically, it’s a bunch of remote islands in the middle of the Pacific. The distinction is often noted the other way round: on September 11, we heard a lot about how this was the first attack on ‘the American mainland’ in two centuries — i.e., excluding Pearl Harbor. But perhaps Hawaiians are sensing their distance from the mainland: perhaps events that seem relatively remote from Massachusetts — the Bali bombing, say — resonate more strongly if you’re working at a beach hotel in Maui. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s poll, while Caucasians split more or less evenly for Bush and Kerry, Filipino-Americans prefer the President by 56 to 36 per cent: could that be connected with the ongoing Islamist subversion of the Philippines?

This is all pure speculation on my part, mainly because the editor turned down my request to spend ten days on a fact-finding mission to this critical battleground resort ...er, state. Nonetheless, Bush’s last- minute Filipino fillip in the Pacific is typical of several curious aspects of this campaign that are difficult to explain according to the usual presidential rules. While I’m yelling, ‘Wake up and smell the coconut milk’, Democrats are pointing to record levels of voter registration which they claim portends a massive youth vote against Bush. Isn’t that what Howard Dean was banking on just before the Iowa caucus? Unfortunately, they never showed up. As I remarked at the time, a lot of the excitable youthful Deaniacs lost their enthusiasm when they discovered that you couldn’t cast your vote by leaving it in the comments section on Howard’s blog.

As if to demonstrate the meaninglessness of their game, last week the pollsters at Harris released their latest findings in two versions. Using the model of likely voters that proved accurate in 2000, Bush led Kerry by 51 to 43. However, if you discard that model and use some new model factoring in a lot of folks who didn’t bother to vote in 2000, Bush leads Kerry only by 48 to 46. Which is accurate? The first? The second? Neither? Harris can’t say. Is there a third model that shows Kerry leading by 73 to 26? Doubtful. If there was, some pollster would surely have come up with it by now. Maybe some other model entirely is the one to use, but it seems unlikely any one will devise it before next Tuesday.

So my hunch that that first Harris poll is the correct one is only that — a hunch that Bush is ahead outside the margin of error. Unfortunately, on election day, he also has to be ahead outside the margin of lawyer, which is a tougher call. The Democrats already have thousands of chad-chasers circling the courthouses in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and even New Hampshire, alas. It’s important for Bush to win big enough both to compensate for Democrat fraud and to deter litigation.

In lively elections such as this the media usually run endless features on ‘angry white men’, a demographic to which they’re not notably partial. After ‘angry white men’ threw out the Democrats’ congressional leadership in the 1994 elections, Peter Jennings, the exquisitely condescending Canadian who anchors ABC News, sniffed that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. But this time round the angry white men are all on the Democrat side, and the media seem to think it’s perfectly normal.

The other night, for example, Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC’s ‘Senior Political Analyst’ (i.e., Democrat hack), discussed John Kerry with John O’Neill, spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This is a flavour of the senior political analysis offered by the Senior Political Analyst, although for the full effect of his shrieking over Mr O’Neill’s attempted answers you really need the big 72-inch screen with quadraphonic surround-sound ranting and digital-quality close-up of his facial contortions:

‘That’s a lie, John O’Neill! Keep lying, it’s all you do!... Lies!... That’s a lie! It’s another lie! That’s a lie! Absolute lie!... You’re just lying...It’s a pack of lies!... He just lied to you! He spews out this filth!... You liar!... You just spew lies!... I just hate the lies of John O’Neill. I hate lies...O’Neill’s a liar, he’s been a liar for 35 years...They lied!... Lies! Just tell me the initials, you liar! Creepy liar!...’

Etc.

A day after this calm measured display of quiet confidence in Senator Kerry’s campaign, his fellow MSNBC honcho, ol’ Pitchfork Pat Buchanan, read a prepared statement by the network apologising for its senior analyst going bananas. Out on the street, meanwhile, angry white men have burgled Republican offices in Spokane, Washington; lobbed cinder blocks through Republican offices in Flagstaff, Arizona; shot up Republican offices in Knoxville, Tennessee; assaulted female Republican students handing out flyers at the Gophers football game in Minnesota; and are currently bullying early voting Republicans at polling booths in Florida. If this campaign went on another two months, they’d be seizing GOP county chairmen and beheading them on video. As it is, if Bush wins by a few hundred in Ohio or New Mexico, these fellows don’t seem inclined to take it lying down.

I say ‘angry white men’ because it’s not clear that the Democrats’ ethnic constituencies — blacks and Hispanics — have the Bush Derangement Syndrome to quite the same degree. In 2000, Bush got just 9 per cent of the black vote. Recent polls show he’s pulling about 18 per cent. If that holds up on election day, John Kerry’s finished. It will also be interesting to see whether Bush can peel away any significant chunk of the hitherto loyally Democrat Jewish vote. Given that he’s already damned as a tool of the Jews by such star ignoramuses of British diplomacy as Sir Ivor Roberts, Her Majesty’s man in Rome, and Sir Crispin Tickell in these very pages, the least the sinister Hebrews could do is show a little more enthusiasm for their puppet in the voting booth. Just a small per cent in the right place — retirees in New Mexico, for example — would pay off very nicely.

It seems unlikely to me that we’re in for another nail-biter of a chad-dangler. It would be astonishing if, after all the epochal events of the first term, it all comes down to a 270–268 squeaker in the electoral college — as if the waters of the mighty storm of the last three years had briefly subsided to reveal the landscape utterly unchanged. Most presidential elections aren’t close and, for all the talk of the 50/50 nation, it’s not quite that even a divide: in the 2002 House races, the Republicans took 53.4 per cent, the Democrats 46.6 per cent. A small sliver of voters concluded that, though we live in interesting times, the Dems have nothing interesting to say and parked their votes elsewhere. The polls didn’t pick up that trend until the results started coming in on election night.

The question now is whether the electorate is closer to the 2002 or the 2000 model. Andrew Sullivan and the other moulting hawks claim that, whatever his inner agonising, a President Kerry will have no choice but to fight the war on terror as robustly — if more smartly and multilaterally — than Bush. This rather overlooks the fact that the strongest force in global affairs is inertia. It seems most probable that, underneath the newly restored polite veneer of international relations, everyone’s attention will wander and the league of nuclear rogue states will expand and so will the list of freelance players in their Rolodexes; and, while John’s hosting Jacques at some summit to celebrate the new Franco–American entente, something will happen and we’ll have to learn the lessons of 9/11 all over again.

So, taking a flyer on a guy who’s spent 30 years siding with the Vietcong, the Soviets, the Sandinistas, the Commies in Grenada and — vis-à-vis Kuwait in 1990 — Saddam Hussein? No thanks.

My sense is that the 2002 model is still operative, and that the Democrats and the media, talking to each other in their mutually self-deluding cocoon, have overplayed the Bush-bashing. Next Tuesday the President will win the states he won last time, plus Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Maine’s Second Congressional District to put him up to 301 electoral votes. Minnesota? Why not? Nudge him up to 311 electoral votes. Oh, and what the hell, give him Hawaii: that’s 315. The Republicans will make a net gain of two seats in the Senate, one of which will bring with it the scalp of the Democrats’ leader, Tom Daschle. Despite distancing himself from Kerry and running ads showing him and Bush embracing, Daschle’s floundering in South Dakota, and his lugubrious mien will be even more lugubriouser within the week. Look for a handful of Republican House gains, too. And Democrats tearing their hair out — or John Kerry’s and John Edwards’s hair, if they can penetrate the styling gel.

The above prediction needs to be able to withstand Democrat fraud, which I’m nervous about. If Tuesday goes off as smoothly as the Afghan election, we’ll be very lucky.

Usually after making wild predictions I confidently toss my job on the line and say, if they don’t pan out, I’m outta here. I’ve done that a couple of times this campaign season — over Wes Clark (remember him?) — but it almost goes without saying in these circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism — that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don’t think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.

From the Christianity Today Weblog:

Episcopal Church Officially Promotes Idol Worship

"Women's Eucharist" calls for worship of pagan deities specifically condemned in Scripture.

Compiled by Ted Olsen | posted 10/26/2004

Imagine for one moment that you're a leader in the Episcopal Church USA. You know that within the next few days, a global commission is going to release a report on how the global Anglican Communion should respond to your church, and is likely to be critical of the ordination of an actively homosexual man as bishop. You know, and have said yourself, that the debate isn't just about sexuality: It's about how one views the Bible. And you know that all eyes will be on your denomination over the next few weeks. What do you do?

What the real leaders of the Episcopal Church did was to take an action that makes ordaining a homosexual man as a bishop almost a non-issue. They started promoting the worship of pagan deities.

This is not a joke nor an overstatement. In all truth and seriousness, leaders of the Episcopal Church USA are promoting pagan rites to pagan deities. And not just any new pagan deities: The Episcopal Church USA, though its Office of Women's Ministries, is actually promoting the worship of idols specifically condemned in Scripture.

A Women's Eucharist: A Celebration of the Divine Feminine" is taken almost completely (without attribution) from a rite from Tuatha de Brighid, "a Clan of modern Druids … who believe in the interconnectedness of all faiths." But who cares where it's from? Look at what it says. Here's how it begins.

We gather around a low table, covered with a woven cloth or shawl. A candle, a bowl or vase of flowers, a large shallow bowl filled with salted water, a chalice of sweet red wine, a cup of milk mixed with honey, and a plate of raisin cakes are placed on the table.

You might be wondering: What's with the raisin cakes? Is it just Communion wafers with raisins? No.

The plate of raisin cakes is raised and a woman says,

"Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers and husbands who would not see your feminine face. We offer you these cakes, made with our own hands; filled with the grain of life—scattered and gathered into one loaf, then broken and shared among many. We offer these cakes and enjoy them too. They are rich with the sweetness of fruit, fertile with the ripeness of grain, sweetened with the power of love. May we also be signs of your love and abundance."

The plate is passed and each woman takes and eats a cake.

So those raisin cakes have a historical reference: Those "brothers and husbands" banned them. Sound familiar? It's a reference to Hosea 3:1:

And the LORD said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins."

Now there are other biblical references to raisin cakes, but this is the only reference (except possibly this one) to them having any kind of role in worship.

Many scholars believe they were offerings to the goddess Asherah, the female counterpart to Baal, but in this context it may be more directly tied to Ishtar/Ashtoreth/Astarte, the "Queen of Heaven."

"Our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven," says the Episcopal liturgy. That's a reference to Jeremiah. And not a happy one. In Jeremiah 7, God complains, "The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger." The liturgy's reference to defiant women worshipping the Queen of Heaven with cakes comes directly from Jeremiah 44:

Then all the men who knew that their wives had made offerings to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered Jeremiah: "As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we will not listen to you. But we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we did, both we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. But since we left off making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine." And the women said, "When we made offerings to the queen of heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands' approval that we made cakes for her bearing her image and poured out drink offerings to her?"

In other words, it wasn't their brothers and husbands that the women were defying: It was God.

And now Episcopal Church leaders want you to do the same. Defy God. Worship pagan deities. There is no other possible reading of this "Eucharistic" text.

It should be noted that the pagan rite isn't on some hidden page in the deep recesses of the Episcopal Church's web site. The site is actually promoting this. The main pages of the web site (there are three: one for members, another for visitors, and a third for leaders) all link to an Episcopal News Service article on the "The Women's Liturgy Project." The article says, in part:

The Office of Women's Ministries is working towards creating a resource to be used by women, men, parishes, dioceses, small groups, within the context of a Sunday morning service, or any other appropriate setting where the honoring of a woman's life passages and experiences beckons a liturgical response. These can include, but are not limited to, liturgies/rites pertaining to: menstruation, menopause, conception, pregnancy, any form of pregnancy loss, childbirth, forms of leave taking, and many others. … There is already a working section on the Women's Ministries website that contains worship resources that are currently available to be downloaded and used by all.

Go to that worship resources page, and there are only nine offerings, the second of which is the "Women's Eucharist." Another troubling entry is the Liturgy for Divorce, which includes this theology:

While the couple have promised in good faith to love until parted by death, in some marriages the love between a wife and a husband comes to an end sooner. Love dies, and when that happens we recognize that the bonds of marriage, based on love, also may be ended . God calls us to right relationships based on love, compassion, mutuality, and justice. Whenever any of these elements is absent from a marital relationship, then that partnership no longer reflects the intentionality of God.

Such a view of love and marriage is profoundly unbiblical, but at least there's no prayer to fertility goddesses. (Commenters over Midwest Conservative Journal are discussing both rituals.)

The Anglican Primate of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, has been explaining that the difference between his church and the Episcopal Church USA isn't your standard intradenominational infighting. The Episcopal Church (along with other western churches, he says), isn't even Christian any more. Instead, he says, it's "embroiled in a new religion which we cannot associate ourselves with."

One would have thought that the Episcopal Church USA might have argued whether it was really practicing a different religion. Instead, their challenge to Akinola's statement might be that it's not new at all: Their idolatry has been around since Old Testament times.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

From The UK Telegraph:

Only one candidate is telling the truth
By Janet Daley

I have a great reverence for language. Like most people who earn their living by manipulating words, I am inclined to favour the side of any dispute that has the most elegant arguments. But in America over the past weeks, watching the final stages of the presidential slug-a-thon, I had to re-order my priorities.

Sitting through the final debate and the endless stump speeches in the "battleground states", it was overwhelmingly clear that George W Bush was inarticulate and right, and that John Kerry was articulate and wrong. Strictly speaking, Kerry is fluent rather than articulate - a good deal of what he says is so self-contradictory as to be technically meaningless, and the rest is incapable of substantiation.

But he talks without pauses or hesitation, his sentences are more or less grammatical, and they seem on superficial hearing to follow on from one another in some sort of order. And that - for the Bush-haters - is pretty much enough to make his candidacy pass for the Second Coming.

While I was there, his running mate, John Edwards, actually did claim that Christopher Reeve would have got out of his wheelchair and walked if Kerry had been in the White House, as a sort of retrospective benediction from the Kerry policy on stem cell research. As I left, the Kerry camp's case was becoming wilder and more unscrupulous.

They had begun by claiming that he personally could have got - and could still get - the co-operation of "our European allies" (that is, the on-and-off allies, France and Germany, rather than the reliable one, Britain) on Iraq. Can he - or anybody - seriously believe that a government as corrupt and self-serving as the present French one would ever have been up for deposing Saddam, who was so very helpful to French oil interests? Or that its "co-operation" now would amount to anything other than a fishing expedition for useful business contacts in any new regime?

Perhaps sensing that this line was not altogether credible, Kerry's strategy had moved on to frightening pensioners (or "seniors", as Americans call them) about their social security cheques. In an echo of Labour's smear tactic in 1997 against Peter Lilley's pension reform proposals, the Democrats were telling elderly voters that Bush planned to "privatise" the federal pension and summarily stop their payments.

What the Bush Administration is actually toying with is allowing people to put a proportion of their social security contribution into an investment account to build up a funded pension: this is seen as the only plausible way forward by virtually all progressive thinking on the pensions crisis, and is certainly what the Democrats themselves would have to adopt if they got into office.

Where Kerry is disingenuous and desperate, Bush is repetitive and crass. But on substance, conviction and moral courage, the President is way out in front. His message may be tailored for the good old boys in the South or the Mid-West, but what he is saying is basically true.

America is engaged in a battle with forces as wicked as any we have known: not the "nuisance" terrorism of the dismissive Kerry world view, but a form of nihilism so dark and sinister that it is almost impossible for Western democratic thinking to get its mind around it.

Those who prefer to see Islamist terror as a kind of analogue of the Cold War communist threat - an enemy which can be contained through military stalemate and diplomatic horse-trading behind the scenes - have got it seriously wrong. There is nothing negotiable about a death cult. There is no diplomatic common language for dealing with those who kidnap and murder people who are trying to bring aid to their own countrymen and co-religionists.

At dinner one night in New York, I found myself next to the editor of the New York Times Book Review. I gave him my argument about how different the confrontation on Islamist terror was from the one with the Soviet Union.

Capitalism and communism, I said, were both products of the 18th-century Enlightenment: they were competing systems with the same moral compass. The argument was about how it was best (most just and beneficial) for people to live. But Islamic fundamentalism declared that a glorious martyred death was preferable to life. This fight was not about how to live, but about whether life was worth having at all. It was of a completely different order, and our opponents were, by the standards of the modern world, unprecedentedly dangerous.

He was, he said, impressed by this account, but it would not wash in the United States because Americans thought of communism not as a misguided attempt to create a beneficent society, but as pure evil. The demonising of the communist threat (which was not, by Stalin's time, without good grounds) made it impossible now to distinguish between the former rational enemy and the current irrational one.

Well yes, I can buy that. But simplistic and crude as American politics may be, its electorate knows a thing or two about real life. The former Clinton aide Dick Morris was asked in a television interview why the term "liberal", by which Americans mean "Left-wing", had come to be so politically damaging. He said it was because the country had learnt that liberal (quasi-socialist) policies didn't work: they didn't end poverty or create opportunity. Only reforming welfare and getting people into work had done that.

Americans care about the real consequences of ideas. I was very aware of that at a dinner to celebrate the 25th birthday of the Manhattan Institute - the think-tank that guided Rudolph Giuliani's mayoral policies. The institute is an embodiment of American "intellectual entrepreneurialism". Find ideas that work, propagate them, and put them into practice: make life better.

That's pretty much the sum total of American political intent.

Perfect Fear Casts Out All "Luv"
by Peter Kreeft

Have you ever noticed the amazing fact that most modern "religious educators" try to remove the very thing the Bible calls "the beginning of wisdom"? I mean, of course, fear—"the fear of the Lord."

An army of modern psychologists is on the side of the educators rather than on the side of the Bible—at least, in America. For Americans desperately want to be wanted, like to be liked, need to be needed. ("People who need people are the luckiest people in the world," you know?)

Then sometimes I think the situation couldn't possibly be that bad, that clear-cut. I must be misunderstanding these modern religious eductors. Perhaps the fear they want to erase is not the fear the Bible speaks at all. What they say is that this biblical fear really means only respect, and the fear the bad old days instilled was terror. Is this true? I think both parts of the claim are untrue.

First, what the Bible means by "the fear of the Lord" is far deeper than mere "respect." You can have respect for policemen, and for debating partners, and even for money. But the "fear of the Lord" is something that takes its specific character from its object, from the Lord. It is awe. It is worship. It is wonder. It is absolute adoration. It is "islam," total "submission" to God. This is precisely the thing absent from both modern religious education and from modern liturgy. The reason is simple: You can't give what you don't have; you can't teach what you don't know yourself.

The second part of the claim is also false. The church did not instill terror in the past, nor is traditional religion based on terror. You have terror toward an enemy, like cancer, or a lion, or a bullet. It is a dead, dread, doomsday kind of feeling. "The fear of the Lord" is exultant and wonderful.

The church used to instill this awe. The main reason she is so weak and wimpy today is because she no longer instills this awe. For this awe is "the beginning of wisdom" and the heart of all true religion.

We have to distinguish three things, then, three kinds of fear: mere respect, awe, and terror. Awe is, in fact, closer to terror than to respect; for awe and terror have in common passion and mystery. Take passion and mystery out of religion and it becomes "psychobabble"—something lukewarm and nice, something flabby and flat and floppy and flaccid, like a wet noodle.

But doesn't the Bible say, "Perfect love casts our fear" (1 Jn 4:18)? And don't Jesus and the angels always tell us, "Fear not"? Yes, but this fear is terror. God would not tell us not to have "the beginning of wisdom"!

Terror is a bond, however primitive, between us and God. It is supposed to be there, and it is supposed to be cast out. It is supposed to be there because we are born original sinners, and the sinful self is naturally and rightly terrified of the goodness of God, which is sin's enemy. It is meant to be cast out because God saves us from sin, and then the relation changes from enemies to friends, and from terror to wonder.

"As long as there are wild beasts around, it is much better to feel fear (terror) than to feel secure," says George MacDonald.

If there is no fear for love to cast out, the love will not arrive as a great conqueror. If there are no dragons, a knight is just a big boy in a tin suit.

Love should cast out terror, but it should not cast out awe. True love includes awe. This is one of the great secrets of sex and marriage that our age has tragically forgotten: awe at the mystery that sex is. Science has not explained away this mystery, nor has psychology. No true mystery is ever explained away. Sex, death, love, evil, beauty, life, the soul, God—these remain forever infinite mysteries that we never exhaust and should not want to. They are like the ocean, for us to swim in, not like a glass of water for us to drink and drain dry.

God is love. And love is not "luv." Luv is nice; love is not nice. Love is a fire, a hurricane, an earthquake, a volcano, a bolt of lightning. Love is what banged out the big bang in the beginning, and love is what went to hell for us on the cross.

The difference between love and "luv" is the difference between the prophetic model of religion and the therapeutic model. In the prophetic model, God commands us to be good. In the therapeutic model, people use religion to make themselves feel good.

Not only are we missing something when fear is absent from religion, but (far worse) we are sinning grievously. For the absence of the fear of God is arrogance and pride. How dare sinners sashay up to God as a chum without first falling down in repentance and fear and calling on the Blood of Christ to save us?

This is not a private opinion; it is the teaching of the Bible, the church, and the saints. All the saints, who are far more advanced in love than we are (that's why they're saints), continued to have fear (awe) of God. They also continued to have terror-fear: not at God, but at sin. They often said things like: it would be better for the world to be destroyed than for one more sin to be committed. Things like: One sin is a thousand times worse than a thousand sufferings. Even the good pagan Socrates knew that "it is far better to suffer evil than to do it." He had a better understanding of the terror of sin than most modern Christians.

Christ himself told us to fear, and whom to fear: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Mt 10:28).

If the thing we fear most is sin, then we will not fear death much, for after death we will no longer be able to sin. That's why the saints look forward to death instead of fearing it. It's a little evil, like a tourniquet or a quarantine; it prevents a far greater evil, like bleeding to death or an epidemic.

Islam has not lost this awe. That's why it's the world's fastest growing religion. Eastern Orthodoxy has not lost it as much has we have in the West. That's one reason why we need reunion with it. The pope often says the church has two lungs, East and West, and needs both to breathe. He has confided that reunion with the East is one of the three most important goals of his pontificate. (The other two are saving the world from nuclear war and cleaning up the church in America. One of these is much easier, the other much harder, than reunion with the East.)

Yes, "perfect love casts out fear." That is, agape casts out terror. But perfect fear also casts out "luv." Awe casts out "luv" as a hurricane casts out a teddy bear.

Perfect love casts out fear, but unless we begin with fear, we cannot progress to perfect love. Fear is the caterpillar; love is the butterfly

From the UK Telegraph:

What's so funny about decapitation?
By Mark Steyn

In Saturday's Guardian, Charlie Brooker concluded his analysis of the presidential election thus: "On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"

Well, wherever they are, they're probably saying: "Why bring us into it? When ol' Lee Harvey decided it was time for JFK to get assassinated, he didn't sit around whining, 'John Wilkes Booth, where are you now that I need you?' Get off your butt and do it yourself, you big Euro-pussy."

But, with the armchair insurgents of the Euro-Left, it's always got to be someone else who straps on the old Semtex belt and waddles off to do the deed. For your average Leftie columnist, the vicarious frisson is more than delicious enough. Anything else would interfere with dinner plans.

By the weekend, the Guardian had thought through the implications of Brooker's comments, and decided that it would be rather embarrassing to be flying in the lucky winners of the big Clark County competition for their US vacation only to discover, as the plane was diverted to Guantanamo, that the entire editorial staff had been placed on a Justice Department watch list. So in re Charlie Wilkes Harvey Brooker, they issued a clarification: "Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."

I can't say I'm a regular reader, so the humour in the column was lost on me - the "joke" is that he wants Dick Cheney to be president, is that it?

Hey-ho. In his mea sorta culpa, he's managed to nail the defects of "the entire civilised world". If by the "civilised world" you mean Europe, Guardian editors, BBC political-discussion panellists, that nice bird from the New Zealand Green Party you met at a conference to demand something be done about something etc, this world is defined almost entirely by its passivity. Whether or not everything is an "ironic joke", hardly anything at all is a "call to action". Does the EU have a position on Darfur? And, if so, who cares?

Brooker's ironic assassination target, being famously moronic, is deluded enough to believe that, when one takes a position on something, one is expected to act on it. But in the "entire civilised world" that's no longer necessary: "Sneer globally, act fitfully" is the watchword. Because Belgium opposes the Iraq war, its foreign minister makes a few anti-Bush cracks and various lesser figures attempt to indict Rumsfeld and co for war crimes - but they know nothing's going to come of that; it's an empty gesture.

Now suppose Belgium took the opposite position and decided it wholeheartedly supported the Iraq war and stood 100 per cent shoulder to shoulder with its American friends in the battle for freedom: in that case, they'd have dispatched a rusting frigate to, oh, the eastern Mediterranean or maybe 30 of their elderly infantrymen to help run the canteen in Qatar. That, too, would have been an empty gesture.

That's why, whoever's president, the September 10 international system can't be put back together. The Cold War required deterrence, which is about as suited to a passivist European culture as can be devised, and even then there were plenty of wobbly moments.

But this new war requires action, resolve, ongoing participation - and most of America's "allies" just can't be fagged. The Spanish vote was a vote for passivity, a call for inaction, and a quiet life no doubt with many "ironic jokes" about the absurd Americans. The "civilised world" sees itself like Continental skating judges at the Olympics, watching the Yanks career all over the ice and then handing out a succession of cranky 4.7s. The decadence of passivity does not express itself solely in "ironic jokes".

The ersatz emotions that gripped Britain in the run-up to Kenneth Bigley's decapitation were also the product of a passive culture unwilling to come to grips with the real challenges it faces. A week ago, I wrote: "In the last three weeks of Mr Bigley's life, the actions of various parties made it more likely that more Britons and other infidels will be kidnapped and beheaded." When I say I wrote it "a week ago", I actually wrote it two weeks ago, but that first Bigley column got spiked by the Editor. Which I regret more and more, because the above point needs to be hammered home.

The kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is, very obviously and tragically, a direct response to the mass Bigley wallow. She is an Iraqi citizen, has lived there for 30 years, was opposed to UN sanctions, the war, the occupation, etc. She has been seized only because of her nominal British citizenship, which, thanks to the Bigley episode, the headhackers now know is the key to weeks of prime-time coverage. In Mrs Hassan's video, her remarks have been scripted by someone keeping a very close eye on Fleet Street - both in the references to Mr Bigley and to the deployment of the Black Watch.

Not all of this is the media's fault. Geoff Hoon's blasé remarks in the House of Commons that the Americans had asked for some of our lads in the Sunni Triangle and he was mulling it over gave the appearance of tossing the question of troop deployment over to the whims of public opinion. And once he put it up for grabs, you can hardly be surprised that Mrs Hassan's captors should seek to apply a little extra pressure. I hope he's learnt his lesson.

But, if this is the best the "civilised world" can do - maudlin sentimentality and ironic jests - then it's in big trouble. Both modes are a pose and a detachment from reality. Brooker and the Guardian seem to be protesting no, don't worry, we were just talking the talk, there's nothing we're prepared to walk the walk for. That's the problem.

From The New York Times:

Faith and Patriotism
By CHARLES J. CHAPUT

Denver — The theologian Karl Barth once said, "To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."

That saying comes to mind as the election approaches and I hear more lectures about how Roman Catholics must not "impose their beliefs on society" or warnings about the need for "the separation of church and state." These are two of the emptiest slogans in current American politics, intended to discourage serious debate. No one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy. Nor does anyone doubt the importance of morality in public life. Therefore, we should recognize these slogans for what they are: frequently dishonest and ultimately dangerous sound bites.

Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That's the nature of the democratic process. If we say that we "ought" to do something, we are making a moral judgment. When our legislators turn that judgment into law, somebody's ought becomes a "must" for the whole of society. This is not inherently dangerous; it's how pluralism works.

Democracy depends on people of conviction expressing their views, confidently and without embarrassment. This give-and-take is an American tradition, and religious believers play a vital role in it. We don't serve our country - in fact we weaken it intellectually - if we downplay our principles or fail to speak forcefully out of some misguided sense of good manners.

People who support permissive abortion laws have no qualms about imposing their views on society. Often working against popular opinion, they have tried to block any effort to change permissive abortion laws since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. That's fair. That's their right. But why should the rules of engagement be different for citizens who oppose those laws?

Catholics have an obligation to work for the common good and the dignity of every person. We see abortion as a matter of civil rights and human dignity, not simply as a matter of religious teaching. We are doubly unfaithful - both to our religious convictions and to our democratic responsibilities - if we fail to support the right to life of the unborn child. Our duties to social justice by no means end there. But they do always begin there, because the right to life is foundational.

For Catholics to take a "pro-choice" view toward abortion contradicts our identity and makes us complicit in how the choice plays out. The "choice" in abortion always involves the choice to end the life of an unborn human being. For anyone who sees this fact clearly, neutrality, silence or private disapproval are not options. They are evils almost as grave as abortion itself. If religious believers do not advance their convictions about public morality in public debate, they are demonstrating not tolerance but cowardice.

The civil order has its own sphere of responsibility, and its own proper autonomy, apart from the church or any other religious community. But civil authorities are never exempt from moral engagement and criticism, either from the church or its members. The founders themselves realized this.

The founders sought to prevent the establishment of an official state church. Given America's history of anti-Catholic nativism, Catholics strongly support the Constitution's approach to religious freedom. But the Constitution does not, nor was it ever intended to, prohibit people or communities of faith from playing an active role in public life. Exiling religion from civic debate separates government from morality and citizens from their consciences. That road leads to politics without character, now a national epidemic.

Words are cheap. Actions matter. If we believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, we need to prove that by our actions, including our political choices. Anything less leads to the corruption of our integrity. Patriotism, which is a virtue for people of all faiths, requires that we fight, ethically and nonviolently, for what we believe. Claiming that "we don't want to impose our beliefs on society" is not merely politically convenient; it is morally incoherent and irresponsible.

As James 2:17 reminds us, in a passage quoted in the final presidential debate, "Faith without works is dead." It is a valid point. People should act on what they claim to believe. Otherwise they are violating their own conscience, and lying to themselves and the rest of us.

Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Denver.

From the blog Football Fans for Truth:

30 Yards Away?

John Kerry has spoken many times of his agonized presence at Game 6 of the 1986 World Series:

* "I was 30 yards away from Billy Buckner in that famous Shea Stadium game in '86." (Cite: ESPN Page 2)
* "Talking baseball on the plane, he reminisced, "I was at Shea Stadium, 30 yards from Bill Buckner," recalling the error that many consider cost the Sox the 1986 World Series." (Cite: "Sox Detour for Kerry", New York Daily News, 7/26/2004)
* "The Bay State senator says he....watched in anguish as the ball rolled through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 Series against the Mets." (Cite: "Bogus Bosox Fan", New York Post, 9/19/2004)
* "I was about 30 yards away from Billy Buckner when that ball wiggled away" (Cite: Kerry tries to rejuvenate his campaign, USA Today 11/24/2003)

Game 6 of the 1986 World Series was held in New York City, on the evening of October 25, 1986.

According to the Boston Globe, John Kerry was at a banquet in Boston on the evening of October 25, 1986.

Boston Globe Archive abstract:

N.M. GOVERNOR DETAILS HIS STATE'S SUCCESS STORY
Published on October 26, 1986
Author(s): Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff

"New Mexico's governor, who holds the highest elected post of any Hispanic nationwide, and the head of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination were given awards for political excellence last night by the Massachusetts Latino Democratic Committee.

More than 250 people -- including Gov. Dukakis, US Sen. John Kerry and an array of state Cabinet members -- attended the banquet at the World Trade Center in South Boston honoring Gov. Toney Anaya and Alex Rodriguez."

A UPI report places Senator Kerry at Game 7 of the 1986 series.

Senator Kerry has confused Lambeau Field with Lambert Field, David Ortiz with a mythical Manny Ortez, and Eddie Yost with a presumably much better Red Sox ballplayer. He has confused Michigan State for Ohio State, Main Street for State Street, and "brat" for "brat".

But could he possibly have confused Game 7 for Game 6?

From The Dertoit Free Press:

Vietnam veterans in 'Stolen Honor' deserve to be heard
BY DAWSON BELL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

In the long run, it probably won't make much difference that the Sinclair Broadcast Group didn't show the documentary film about John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism as a primetime news show.

"Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" is not first-rate television drama, just a series of interviews with middle-age men who were decorated soldiers and prisoners of war before their hair turned white. Mixed in are not-very-revelatory archival footage of the war, war protestors, the Hanoi Hilton and a young Lt. Kerry in Vietnam Veterans Against the War pose.

Still, it's too bad it didn't air. These guys deserve to be heard.

Although dismissed by their critics on the left as a handful of bitter old men trying to settle a misguided grudge, the stars of "Stolen Honor" don't look like fringe characters. They look pretty ordinary. A little beefy and bifocaled, not quite comfortable on camera. Like most Americans, they aren't particularly articulate.

But what they're trying to say is pretty clear. They think John Kerry and his antiwar allies got it badly wrong on Vietnam. They say they suffered in enemy prison because of it. And -- worst of all -- that America has wound up with the wrong narrative on a war that defined their young lives.

They are dismayed that no one has ever been held accountable for what they consider to be the slander of a generation of soldiers.

In the campaign to keep it off the air, "Stolen Honor" was assailed as agitprop, compared to Nazi propaganda and criticized for its lack of balance. Unquestionably, it is one-sided. But the film techniques in "Stolen Honor" don't come close to the sophistication, bias or deceit of "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Unless the men depicted don't exist or their backgrounds are fabricated, "Stolen Honor" is what the men in the film believe is the truth about what happened to them and their country.

At times, theirs is almost a quaint form of outrage. Robinson Risner, who spent more than seven years in captivity, has a note of incredulity in his voice (he sounds a bit like a character from "The Andy Griffith Show") as he describes a session with his North Vietnamese tormenter/interrogator.

The interrogator told him the antiwar crowd, some of whom were visiting Hanoi, "said they were winning the war in the streets of America.

"I certainly did not approve of that. I didn't think it was right for an American to come over and bolster the Vietnamese morale."

To the extent they address Risner and his colleagues at all -- which is not much -- Kerry's defenders and the critics of "Stolen Honor" scoff at the idea that his post-war activities had adverse consequences. They talk about America's venerable tradition of freedom to dissent. They insist Kerry's was a voice of moderation in a chorus of radical antiwar anger. Besides, they say, young Lt. Kerry really wasn't all that important a figure in the antiwar movement.

Leo Thorsness, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who spent five years in prison during Vietnam, disagrees.

After Kerry, as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, testified before the U.S. Senate in 1971 about alleged atrocities by U.S. troops, "We were being told we were war criminals, and we will be tried for war crimes.

"Unless we confess and ask for forgiveness and bad-mouth the war... we'll never go home. Here's a guy at home. He's been in Vietnam, so you have some respect for a person that went over there. And now, he swaps to the other side, and he's saying the same things we're being tortured to say."

For producer Carlton Sherwood and the ex-POWs in "Stolen Honor," it is dumbfounding that the story about the war they fought in, watched friends die for, and in which they endured years of torture and captivity, has been told by people like Francis Ford Coppola, Tim O'Brien and John Prine.

To them, Vietnam may have been bungled, even misguided. But they are proud of their service. They think their country, even when it screws up, has good intentions. They remember the hardship and sacrifice and loneliness. And they think it is incomprehensible the nation has somehow come to believe that they were, in Kerry's words, men "given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history."

The Kerry campaign responded to "Stolen Honor" by again insisting that Kerry wasn't offering personal witness when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the actions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam had been pervasively barbaric ("They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads...razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan" etc. etc.).

He was merely summarizing testimony he'd collected from other vets. The implication, of course, is that Kerry wasn't attesting to the veracity of those tales, just passing them along. That's a joke. To judge for yourself whether Kerry believed the things he told the committee had actually happened read or listen to his testimony. It is widely available on the Internet (Do a Google search for "Kerry's senate testimony").

The other defense is based, somewhat confusingly, on the notion that there really were widespread atrocities in Vietnam. Kerry won't swear to them anymore, but lots of other people will.

Jim Warner spent five years and five months in enemy custody during Vietnam, according to "Stolen Honor." He obviously doesn't think of himself as a rapist and murderer. He obviously does think of Kerry as an opportunist, who used his antiwar activity to launch a political career.

Warner says his interrogators showed him passages of an antiwar book Kerry helped edit in which Warner's mother criticized the war while he was still in captivity.

Bristling with anger, he says: "It is really...it is really a contemptible act to take a grieving old lady and...prey upon her grief and manipulate her grief purely for the promotion of your political agenda."

Another ex-POW, Ron Webb, was held by the North Vietnamese for five years and eight months. It is perhaps understandable that he is not much interested in the nuanced view of Kerry's antiwar activities. He has his own context.

"They drew a circle on the floor, the stone floor, with a piece of chalk. And I was to stand in that circle. And I lasted 97 hours in that circle. But when I finally gave it up I... got into it with a guard and got beaten up pretty bad...and broke some teeth."

While he was confined to the circle, Webb says, his abusers arranged for him to see visiting Americans passing by, antiwar activist Tom Hayden among them, "I guess to influence me that Americans were obviously opposed to the war and that I ought to be also."

It may be unfair to hold Kerry accountable for what happened to these men. It certainly is arguable he had little influence on the course of the war and the formation of public opinion about it, and less on how the North Vietnamese treated prisoners. The view of the POWs in "Stolen Honor" may be far from a consensus. Many veterans -- certainly those who support Kerry's candidacy -- seem untroubled by the prospect of electing him commander -in chief. And many Americans are simply tired of reliving Vietnam.

For that reason and others, "Stolen Honor" was not likely to attract a very large audience in the first place, even if it had been broadcast uncut. Neither was it likely to change the perception about Kerry or the Vietnam War. But it's pretty clear that the veterans in it are not lying about what they believe. They think the dominant cultural image of Vietnam as a war of imperialistic greed fought by drug-crazed baby killers is an evil slander.

And they think it's time someone listened.

As Bob Dole reportedly said about an intemperate outburst from Vietnam vet John McCain, also a long-term guest at the Hanoi Hilton: "You spend five years in a box, and you're entitled to speak your mind."

From The Chicago Sun Times. Does Steyn ever write an unsound word?

No time for Kerry's Europhile delusions
BY MARK STEYN

Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to mid-December. These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush's curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age.

There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it.

As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up.

But, even if he weren't, that's a frivolous reductive way of looking at this war. He's not a general or head of state; he can't sign an instrument of surrender, and make all the unpleasantness go away. The enemy is an ideology that appeals to various loose groupings from the Balkans to Indonesia, as well as to entrepreneurial free-lancers like the shooter who killed two people at LAX on July 4, 2002. If Kerry's oft-repeated "outsourcing Osama" crack is genuinely felt, it shows he doesn't get this war. And, if it's just cheapo point scoring, it's pathetic.

Almost everything falls into that category. Iraq's messy. So? What isn't? America has no Colonial Office, no political administrators with decades of experience in far-flung climes; its occupation of Iraq was learnt on the fly, because there was no other way. But the ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.

Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's "prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.

The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he's committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.'' The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.